This Date in Weekender History: Remember the Final Four? Pink Floyd?

Fans head into the Alamodome for the start of the Men’s Final Four in 2004.

Highlights from Weekenders of five, 10 and 15 years ago. Now that “Today in History” (which “This Date in Weekender History” has desperately tried to emulate) has been downsized from its S.A. Life incarnation to a few items on top of Page 3A, this feature is now the king of looking back.

April 2, 2004

EVENTS

 Final Four: Remember when we used to get a close-up look at March Madness on a regular basis? The Final Four of the men’s tournament invaded the Alamodome with Oklahoma State, Connecticut, Georgia Tech and Duke slugging it out and UConn coming out on top. They had a giant bracket on the side of the Convention Center. Sideshows included the interactive Hoop City and a game between the College All-Stars and the Globetrotters. No Big Dance yet, unfortunately.

I put together a “Final Four at-a-Glance” feature that bemoaned the fact that my favorite player didn’t make it. That would be another Johnson: Carldell, who played for UAB, which was eliminated by Kentucky in the Sweet 16. His nickname was Squeaky. I thought Squeaky Johnson had a nice ring to it.

(File Photo)

Eddie Guerrero, shown in March 2004, was part of Smackdown a month later. He died in November 2005.

 The Poteet Strawberry Festival took place against an unfestive backdrop of wrangling over the annual Strawberry Parade between the city and the festival association. What’s scary is the festival brought in a giant mascot  a smiling strawberry named Freckles.

 WWE Smackdown! One of the stars at the SBC Center event was Eddie Guerrero, whose dismissal for a time because of alcohol addiction was mentioned in the preview. Guerrero was found dead Nov. 11, 2005 in a Minneapolis hotel room; an autopsy listed the cause of death as heart failure. He was 38.

MUSIC

 Twista: The Chicago hip-hop performer made the Weekender cover this week, mainly because he was on top of the world thanks to the single “Slow Jamz.” Headlining the World Music Festival in Sunken Garden Theater, he was known for his rapid-fire delivery. “Man, I’m having fun,” he told Express-News music writer Hector Saldaña. “I’m counting my blessings every time I step into a limo, every time I do an interview.”

 Train: This show, the Dasani Fest, at Sunset Station, could have been billed as “Featuring bands that were famous until nu-metal and rap-metal happened.” The lineup included Train, Blues Traveler, Sister Hazel, Better Than Ezra and Grupo Vida, for some reason. Train front man Patrick Monahan told Hector Saldaña he didn’t mind playing smaller venues. “It’s so much more satisfying. You know what it does? It allows us to make mistakes. And that’s what you live for. Every day is different. Every day we play songs we just learned that day, and that’s musical to me.”

MOVIES

 “Hellboy”: Ron Perlman’s red devil with the sawed-off horns made a delightful debut in the film directed by Guillermo del Toro. In his 3½-pepper review, E-N critic Larry Ratliff described it as “very campy, extremely well made and tons of fun.”

ALSO OPENING: The remake of “Walking Tall,” the Disney animated flick “Home on the Range” and the hidden-royalty yarn “The Prince and Me” starring Julia Stiles and Luke Mably, who apparently fell down a hole after making this.

(Express-News File Photo)

Celine Dion in her big Alamodome show in 1999.

April 2, 1998

EVENTS, MUSIC

 Celine Dion: The French-Canadian songstress, who visited the AT&T Center in January 2009, was an even bigger deal 10 years ago. Blame “Titanic” and “My Heart Will Go On.” She played the Alamodome on her Let’s Talk About Love tour, which was a considerable step up from her previous visit to town  openng for Michael Bolton at SeaWorld in 1992. One thing that hasn’t changed  she didn’t do an interview for etiher the 1999 or 2009 shows.

 The Offspring: Punk-rock band played Sunken Garden having survived and prospered after a backlash that followed its 1994 breakthrough CD “Smash,” which sold 11 million copies and provoked the usual cries of sellout. They got the last laugh when their latest CD, “Americana,” produced a monster hit with “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy),” which starts with a Def Leppard sample. “Dexter (singer Brian ‘Dexter’ Holland) wrote the song,” bassist Greg Kriesel told ace free-lancer David Glessner. “He just started with a riff and kept adding things. He didn’t set out to write a multicultural song. We decided it needed something to get it going, so we contacted (Def Leppard) and paid them a flat fee. I don’t remember how much we paid, but they were into it.”

 Steve Earle goes bluegrass: The San Antonio troubadour teamed up with bluegrass ace Del McCoury at the Cabaret in Bandera. “Categorization is not good for me,” he told the E-N’s Jim Beal Jr. “I’m allergic to it.”

 First Friday: Probably the only time a photo of one of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s “Rat Fink” creations ever appeared in Weekender. Roth was featured in an exhibit at Studio Gallo.

MOVIES

It’s interesting to see that at the time, we thought that “The Out-of-Towners,” the Steve Martin/Goldie Hawn screwball comedy about an Ohio couple on a bumpy trip to the Big Apple, was a bigger deal than “The Matrix.” It got the lead-review position, while “The Matrix” and “10 Things I Hate About You,” the high school rewrite of “The Taming of the Shrew,” were relegated to the second page.

For the record, Larry Ratliff liked “The Out-of-Towners” best of the three.

Also, the Crossroads Theater began a two-week series of screenings celebrating Columbia Pictures’ 75th anniversary. The first-week lineup included a few decent films: “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Dr. Strangelove” (one of my all-time favorites), “Easy Rider,” “It Happened One Night,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

The Weekender cover from April 1, 1994 is missing! Really! But it looked something like this  the cover of Pnk Floyd’s ‘The Division Bell.’

April 1, 1994

A dark day in Weekender Land, mainly because sometime in mid-1994 some evil person threw away my bound volume of the first four months of the year. I managed to reconstruct it with one major, major exception  this one. Talk about your April Fool’s joke.

And this would have been a good one to have, because Pink Floyd was at the Alamodome playing one of the biggest rock shows ever to hit S.A., although the Rolling Stones’ show in November 1994 would be up there, too. The band, with key players David Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason augmented by eight more players, played on a stage that was 200 feet wide and 80 feet deep, featured a 120-foot arch, involved 700 tons of steel scaffolding and took 60 hours to set up. The set included everything from “Astronomy Domine” to cuts from “The Divison Bell,” which came out two days after the show.

Two things I remember about the missing cover:

1. It had the “Division Bell” artwork, with those big, Stonehenge-looking ear-faces looking at each other and chatting.

2. Since it was April Fool’s Day, all the text on the cover was bogus and goofy. The Pink Floyd tout said something like, “band abandons space-rock sound for an all-blues show.”)